Systems and methods herein generally relate to print job settings and more particularly to methods and devices that prepare print job ticket settings.
Printing system users sometimes find themselves in the situation of having a document that has been printed or rasterized using various imposition settings (imposition settings are job settings that cause page images to be placed on print media at specific locations, orientations, and scalings) without access to such imposition settings, or with access only to the imposition settings in a format not consumable by currently available printing equipment. For example, the user may not be able to locate the job ticket of the previously printed document, or may not have access to the print queue that provided the previous imposition settings. Alternatively, the user may wish to utilize different printing equipment that cannot interpret the imposition settings used to print the previous document.
Therefore, the user may be in possession of a printed document (or the sheet images of a previously rasterized document) that has a desirable imposition layout; however, the user may have no way of obtaining the settings utilized to print the document according to this layout. In such a situation, the user will undertake the laborious and error-prone process of establishing various settings in order to arrive at the same imposition layout used in the previous document. This process can be frustrating and wasteful for the user, which can result in user dissatisfaction.
Exemplary methods herein receive, into a computerized device, the already-imposed sheet images of a previously printed document (created through scanning, raster image processing, etc.), a second document to be printed, and instructions to use the imposition settings of the previously printed document to print the second document. These methods automatically (using the computerized device) detect page boundaries, detect page orientation, and detect page sequencing within the sheet images of the previously printed document in order to identify the imposition parameters used to print the previously printed document. With this, these methods (again using the computerized device) automatically prepare a print job ticket for the second document that has imposition parameters that match the previous imposition parameters. After this, these methods output (e.g., print or transmit from the computerized device) the second document using the print job ticket to cause the imposition layout of the second document to match that of the previously printed document.
Additional methods herein similarly receive, into a computerized device, an image of a previously printed document (created through scanning, raster image processing, etc.), a second document to be printed, and instructions to use the imposition settings of the previously printed document to print the second document. These methods again automatically (using the computerized device) detect page boundaries, detect page orientation, and detect page sequencing within the sheet images of the previously printed document in order to identify the imposition parameters used to print the previously printed document. With this, these methods (again using the computerized device) automatically prepare a print job ticket for the second document that has imposition parameters that match the previous imposition parameters (to potentially allow such an automatically created job ticket to be manually edited by the user).
Other methods herein receive the sheet images of a document previously ripped according to certain imposition settings, and a different, alternative set of imposition settings, and these methods automatically produce a print job containing the same logical page images, but now imposed according to the alternative imposition settings instead of the previous imposition settings. These methods produce an imposition job ticket that can be used to perform the same imposition transformation on similarly-imposed jobs in the future.
The process of detecting page boundaries can be, for example, based on: finisher alignment marks in the images of the previously printed document; bounding boxes of non-white content in the images of the previously printed document; margin consistency in the images of the previously printed document; spacing of pages in the images of the previously printed document; page height and width in the images of the previously printed document; page size consistency in the images of the previously printed document; size of imposed sheet in the images of the previously printed document; and/or comparison of inferred page size within tolerances to commonly-used sizes in the images of the previously printed document; etc.
The process of detecting page orientation can be, for example, based on: recognizing text, text lines, and blocks in the images of the previously printed document; placement and orientation of page numbers in the images of the previously printed document; and/or inferences from overall layout geometry of the images of the previously printed document; etc.
The process of detecting page sequencing can be, for example, based on: identifying sequential page numbers at repeatable standard locations in the images of the previously printed document; and/or performing sentence-level grammatical analysis, when sentences break across adjacent pages in the images of the previously printed document; etc.
These and other features are described in, or are apparent from, the following detailed description.